The Gate of Doom
by TheGrouchoMarxist
Summary: Morse and Lewis investigate a murder that seems to be linked to the ancient city of Sarnath, and the doom that befell it. Is the same thing about to happen to Oxford? And will Lewis ever manage to have a barbeque that isn't interrupted by violent death? I do not own any characters created by the late Colin Dexter.


**THE GATE OF DOOM**

The day they found Dr Robert Farthing's body in the water meadow by the Thames was the best day of that summer so far. The sun burned down fiercely from a blue sky occupied by no more than a few white clouds like small fluffy balls of cotton wool. It was sticky indoors, hot out and everyone's mind was on getting the barbecue going properly without annoying the neighbours with the smoke, and whether the kids' paddling pool still had that slow leak in it.

Farthing's mind, or at any rate much of his brain, was splattered across the black earth of Trench 1, just above where he lay, face down, the back of his head caved in. That, however, was not the detail that those who found him first noticed. Their eyes followed the line of Farthing's arm as it stretched up past his head, pointing towards the strange stone object his team had dug up the day before. They saw the blood on his index finger, and then the bloody writing on the side of the object. It read: DOOM.

Then they called Thames Valley Police, who in turn got hold of Detective Chief Inspector Morse, perhaps the only person in Oxford who had been voluntarily spending a hot Saturday in summer inside.

"I was looking forward to getting through the 1972 Von Karajan recording of _Don Giovanni_ with Bettina Kransdorf as Donna Elvira and Wolfgang Von Mulheim as the Don," he grumbled to Detective Sergeant Robbie Lewis as they drove down to Port Meadow. "And then some inconsiderate sod has to get himself murdered!"

"It's a tough life, sir," said Lewis, in his soft Geordie lilt. "I was planning a barbecue myself."

Morse snorted. "We've had five thousand years of human civilisation so we could avoid having to live off half-cooked meat roasted over an open fire, Lewis. Anyway, what do we know about the victim?"

Lewis glanced down at his notebook. "Dr Robert Farthing, archaeologist and Fellow of St Mildred's College. He was one of a team from the Oxfordshire County Archaeological Service who were digging in the meadows in the hope of finding the remains of a mediaeval monastery that's supposed to have stood there. They opened up some trenches, found some walls and a few artefacts. It looked pretty promising, so much so that apparently he was still on the site when everyone else left last night. And that's where he got his head bashed in. Oh, and apparently someone's written "DOOM" in blood on a big stone…thing that they found yesterday and is standing next to where the body is."

Morse had been powering his Jaguar along a suburban road, but he swerved over to the kerb and stopped on hearing this. He glanced over at his confused-looking assistant, white eyebrows bristling.

"Lewis, is that some kind of joke?"

"Is what a joke, sir?"

"That there's a stone artefact lying next to the body with "DOOM" written on it in blood. What is this, a Sherlock Holmes story or something? Next thing you'll be telling me they found the footprints of a gigantic hound next to the body too."

"I'm not joking, sir. That's really what's happened. At any rate, that's what PC Collins from the Patrol Team, told me, and I don't think he was trying to pull my leg when he said it."

Morse was silent for a few seconds. Then he started the car again, and pulled away from the kerb.

"Lewis," he said. "I think we may be dealing with something very much out of the ordinary here. What do we know about Farthing?"

"I had a quick word with the Senior Tutor at St Mildred's and Googled his name. Nothing that would suggest a personal motive for murder. He seems to have been a generally respected academic and liked by his colleagues. Single, no kids – seems to have pretty much lived for his work."

"Maybe someone just saw him on his own in the dusk and fancied his wallet."

"No – the wallet, money, credit cards and all that were still on the body."

They came to the end of a cul-de-sac leading on to the Meadow, and Morse parked the car.

"So much for that theory, then. No more until we've seen the body."

The Meadow lay between the sprawl of suburban housing and the river, gleaming in the distance under the sun. It was huge, flat and grass-covered. They walked to the site of the archaeological dig, which wasn't hard to find, surrounded as it was by police vehicles and tape, and filled with people in white boiler suits and masks going about their various forensic tasks.

"Morning, Morse," called out the pathologist, Dr Cooke.

"Morning, Jenny," replied Morse. "What have you found?"

"The victim's in the trench here." They walked over to it and peered over the edge. "Based on the core temperature and rigor my best guess is that he died between 8 o'clock and midnight last night. I'm not going to have cause of death until I've done a proper post mortem, but you only have to look at his head to say it's likely to be blunt force trauma. He was battered repeatedly from behind with some heavy object."

Morse winced. "And someone really did write "DOOM" in blood on that stone object there." He pointed to it, a cube of grey stone about three feet by three feet, the surface rough and coarse. On the front was a carving of what looked at first glance like a human, although longer examination revealed it to have distinctly lizard-like features – scaly skin, a tail and a hideous looking set of fangs. "What on earth is it?"

Cooke shrugged. "Ask the other archaeologists. One of them is just over there." He pointed towards a man standing next to a police van outside the circle of tape. "It certainly doesn't look like anything you'd expect to find in a mediaeval monastery, though. And that is human blood. Most likely Dr Farthing's, although we'll have to test it down at the lab to be sure."

"Did Farthing write that on there himself, or was it written by whoever killed him?" mused Morse. "And who or what did whoever wrote it think was doomed?"

"If he wrote it, it's a bit of a strange choice for your dying message to the world," said Lewis. "I'd try and write down the name of the murderer, like that French woman did a few years back."

"If that was what she did. Come on," replied Morse, and they walked over to the man that Cooke had pointed at. He was about sixty or so, grey-haired and scraggily bearded, and wearing mud-spattered clothes that looked like they'd seen a lot of wear and tear. Morse did the introductions:-

"Hello, sir, I'm Detective Chief Inspector Morse and this is Detective Sergeant Lewis. I understand you were one of Dr Farthing's colleagues. I'm sorry about your loss. Maybe you could help answer a few questions about what happened."

The bearded man shook their hands. "Yes, of course. I'm Frank Stapleton, from St Mildred's College. I was helping Bob run this excavation with some of our graduate students." He gazed over towards the trench. "I still can't really believe what's happened to Bob. I can't think of anyone in the world who would wish him harm."

"Well, someone did," said Morse. "What were you trying to achieve down here?"

"Oh, it was tied in with the new student accommodation the University is building not far from here. You may have heard about it – it's been in the local papers quite a bit. A lot of people, environmentalists and so on, really don't like the idea of building over part of the Meadow. Anyway, some of the locals who've been campaigning against it got hold of some evidence from that there might have been a monastic building down here, really as more ammunition against the development. The County Archeology Service got wind of it, and asked us to investigate."

"And did you find anything?" asked Lewis.

"Well, that's just it. We were all a bit sceptical about the story, really. We thought these campaigners had probably over-egged the pudding a bit, in the hope of forcing a public inquiry. But blow me down if we didn't find some pretty massive bits of masonry in those trenches, parts of walls it looks like. Funny thing is, though, they don't seem to be mediaeval. They seem older, much, much older. We found bits of mediaeval pottery and even older remains in the layers _above_ them. Of course, that could be the result of ploughing or something stirring up the soil, but…it's odd."

"And the object that Dr Farthing was found lying next to?" asked Morse.

"Just as peculiar, really. Frankly, it's the right size and shape to be a small pagan altar, but I have no idea what that would be doing in a monastery. And that lizard-thing on it doesn't look like any deity I've ever heard of either."

"So what was Dr Farthing's reaction to all this?"

"He was excited. We were all rather excited, because it looked as if we might have a rather intriguing puzzle on our hands. New monastic sites are rare enough, but this really might be something special. I think that's why Bob stayed behind after the rest of us all called it a day yesterday. He was trying to puzzle out what we had here."

"What time was this?"

"About 8 o'clock or so, I think. The light was fading, so there wasn't much more we could usefully do. I got home about quarter past. We found Bob when we came back to start digging again this morning."

There was a brief silence. Morse knew from long experience how uncomfortable his next question was to ask.

"Can anyone vouch for your whereabouts after you got home?"

"Yes, my wife, Pamela. I was with her all evening, just ask her."

"Morse!" Dr Cooke's voice suddenly cut in to the conversation. There was a note of urgency to it. "Just come back over here, would you?" Morse spun around.

"Thanks, Mr Stapleton," said Lewis, hastily. "We'll let you know if we need to speak further."

They walked back towards Trench 1. Cooke was standing near the edge, next to a Scenes of Crime Officer waving something in a plastic evidence bag. As they came nearer, they could see it was a mobile phone.

"We were lifting the body out of the trench, and this was lying under it. You need to see what's at the top of the "numbers dialled" log." The SOCO's rubber-gloved fingers poked at a few buttons to bring up the record.

"So who's Walter Ludlow when he's at home?" asked Morse.

"He's the last person Dr Farthing called," said Lewis. "At 8.06 pm, not after he was left on his own. Maybe not long before he died."

"Then he's the next person we'll be seeing," said Morse.

A quick call to Walter Ludlow's mobile number got nothing more than his voicemail, so Morse and Lewis drove back to their office at St Aldates Police Station in the town centre to wait for a reply, and for the results of the post-mortem and forensic tests. It didn't take Morse long to get impatient with Ludlow's lack of response, though.

"He could have scarpered by now, or be lying dead somewhere," he growled, grasping his desk impatiently. "Come on, Lewis, this is a lead in a murder investigation – we've got to do something more pro-active than wait."

Lewis was happy to get pro-active. The alternatives were either solving a spate of break-ins near Headington Hill with no evidence or completing DC Wilson's appraisal, which would involve time wasted finding fresh words to describe "a tolerably adequate police officer" and fresh justifications for that judgement. He turned to his computer and the databases available on it.

"Ludlow's name's actually come up a few times in the records before," he said, peering at the glowing blue screen. "Not as an offender or suspect, I mean, but as a witness or as being somehow _around_ some kind of…happening. All pretty weird-sounding. I mean, he once turned up in a wood in Reading after a flood of reports of strange lights and noises, with burns on his face, and all he would say was "If I told you what happened, you wouldn't believe me." Apart from his burns, there was no evidence anything _had_ happened, so no action was taken."

Morse bit into an apple from his packed lunch. "OK, now I'm even more interested in him…but where is he?"

A bit more searching established that Ludlow was a Reader in Psycholinguistics ("that's not a real subject!" interjected Morse) at the University of Chelmsford, and a call to that institution established that he was staying at Lincoln College whilst attending a conference there on "Whither the Sapir-Whorf Thesis?".

The light grey stone of the College's steep-roofed frontage was hot to the touch when they walked through its doors and into the Porters' Lodge. Dr Ludlow, it transpired, had been delivering a paper at the conference that morning, and the conference was just breaking for lunch. They found him amongst the academics streaming out of the Hall, a stocky, balding man in his fifties, grey haired and wearing corduroy trousers and a tweed jacket with leather arm patches as if to the manner born.

"Dr Ludlow?" asked Morse. Ludlow looked distracted, as if he were trying to think what to do next.

"Hello, I suppose you must be the police. I've just picked up the message on my phone."

"Yes. I'm Detective Chief Inspector Morse; this is Detective Sergeant Lewis. Can we talk in private?"

"My room is over there." Ludlow nodded towards a doorway on the right hand side of the quadrangle, which they began to walk towards. "So what's of such great interest to you about my phone call from Dr Farthing last night?"

"I'm afraid to say he was found dead this morning, Dr Ludlow," said Morse. "We believe he was murdered."

Ludlow stopped sharply, a horrified look on his face. "Oh, Christ," he muttered. "I…I had no idea. And nothing he said suggested that anything was…imminent."

""Imminent", Dr Ludlow?" said Morse. "That suggests to me you thought Dr Farthing was at risk of something happening, eventually."

Ludlow started walking again. "Well, I wasn't sure. Look, if you want the truth, Bob mostly called me because we are…were friends, he knew I was in Oxford at this conference and he wanted to let me know about this exciting new discovery of his. But the more he described what he had found – massive, ancient-looking masonry going back to long before anyone was building large stone buildings in this part of the world, the more it worried me. It just didn't seem right, didn't seem healthy."

"What do you mean by that, exactly?" asked Lewis.

They had walked a little way down a dark passageway to the door of Ludlow's room. He did not reply for the moment, but unlocked the great oak door and swung it open. They all went inside. It was something like the bedroom of a Travelodge would have been like, if they had existed in the fifteenth century. Ludlow shut the door firmly after them.

"What would you say if I told you that there are things in this world that most people have no idea about and would barely comprehend if you explained to them?"

Morse and Lewis gave each other a significant look. Morse didn't actually roll his eyes, but it took the exercise of superhuman effort for him not to.

"I would say, Dr Ludlow, that, firstly, you should probably avoid quoting from _The Matrix_ when being interviewed by the police, secondly, if this has anything to do with water fluoridation or chemtrails, that's for the Department of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, not me, and thirdly, the quicker you get to the point, the quicker this interview will be over."

Ludlow flushed. "OK, bad choice of words. Look, Bob and I got to know each other because of a mutual interest in the very early origins of mankind – in his case, the remains, in my case, the development of language. And we'd both come to the conclusion that the official version wasn't telling the whole story, that there were human civilisations that existed well before the ones we knew about and that, well, maybe there were even civilisations before there were humans. I thought Bob might have discovered the remains of one of those pre-human civilisations, and I was worried about what uncovering that might release."

Morse raised an eyebrow. "Well, I'm no archaeologist, and I don't know anything about "pre-human civilisations", but surely what's dead and gone is dead and gone. You can't release it."

"I wasn't so sure," said Ludlow. "And I told Bob. As a wise man once said, "That is not dead which can eternal lie, and with strange aeons death may die.""

Lewis and Morse glanced at each other again. This wasn't looking too good. Lewis decided to re-rail things a bit.

"Can you tell us where you were between 8pm and midnight last night?"

"In here, either working on my paper for today or sleeping."

"Can anyone prove that?"

"Not really. You can check with the porters though. Presumably they'd have noticed me going out."

"Dr Ludlow," said Morse, "to use your favourite phrase – what would you say if I told you that Dr Farthing's body was found next to a stone altar on which either he or someone else had daubed "DOOM" in blood?"

Ludlow's face took on a ghastly grey hue, and he looked down at his shoes. "I…I…I'd say I don't think I can help you any more, Inspector. Please, I need some time to take this all in."

They left him slumped in a chair and walked out through the Front Quad and the main gate. The early afternoon sun was at its hottest, beating down on to the whole of one side of the open square. Lewis wondered whether his wife, Valerie, had coped with running the barbeque OK unaided. He assumed she'd have phoned if not. He was going to have to schedule some leave to make up for this.

"What do you make of Dr Ludlow, Lewis?" broke in Morse.

"Honestly, sir, I think he's a bit of a fruitcake."

"I think you may be right. And one with no alibi, too. Still, unless he's genuinely psychotic and hiding it well, he doesn't seem to have much of a motive for murdering his friend, and he doesn't seem to have any other reason to do it. I'll ask someone to come down and go through the videos from the College CCTV system though. That'll be a much better guide to who's been in and out than the porters will."

They drove back to St Aldates, where the latest e-mail on Morse's computer was from Dr Cooke, with her preliminary views from the post-mortem. It was definitely death by blunt force trauma to the back of the head, and it was Farthing's blood daubed on the altar. Cooke had also found various deep scratches on his back, almost deep enough to be claw marks.

"This is getting stranger by the minute," said Lewis. He wandered over to the door of their office and stood in front of it, hands on hips and gazing off into the middle-distance. "There's "DOOM" in his blood on the altar, which makes no sense unless we're up against some kind of ritualistic killer. The scratches – well, in another case you might say they were defensive wounds, but on the _back_? And if they're actual claw marks, what on earth put them there?"

"You know," said Morse, quietly, from behind his desk. "It's not unknown for a very straight-forward killing to have superficially bizarre trappings. Perhaps that's what we have here. You must have read about the Walton murder, in 1945, in Warwickshire. An elderly farm labourer is found dead in the field he was working in, a cross slashed in his throat with his own bill-hook, pinned to the ground with his own pitchfork. There's some village story about supposed witches who were killed in a vaguely similar way, and everyone and his dog since has run off with wild tales of witchcraft and Satanism in the English countryside. But right from the start, in the Walton case, the police suspected Walton's employer of murdering him, and there was a possible motive over money, just not enough evidence to stand up in court."

Lewis sat back down in his chair. "Yeah, but we don't have any kind of suspect or any motive here."

"I know," replied Morse. "Oh, look, this is bloody ridiculous. OK, it was possibly starting to get dark, but the guy was killed in a public place used by loads of people, not that far from houses. Are you telling me no-one saw anything? The Patrol guys were supposed to be knocking on doors – have they come up with anything?"

"I haven't heard back yet."

"Well get on them, Lewis! And see if we can get some posters asking for information put up around the Meadow area. I was just looking on the internet and this story is already on various news websites. It'll certainly be on the local evening news and perhaps the national news too. Let's strike while the iron's hot, before people forget all about this."

"OK, sir." Lewis went out of the room to see if he could collar someone from Patrol, in the hope of collating any reports of witnesses that had turned up. He was still struggling to find the right wording for Wilson's appraisal, and anyway getting out from under Morse's feet would give him a chance to phone up his wife and check how things had gone.

Morse felt a visit to St Mildred's College might be in order. Most people, after all, are murdered by those who know them well, and, for Dr Farthing, that appeared to mean those he worked with. He'd go down solo, to let Lewis get on with following up the outstanding leads here. As soon as he'd scribbled a quick note to Lewis to tell him where he'd gone, Morse followed him out of the office. At the end of the corridor the office was on, he came to a set of stairs leading down to the ground floor of the police station and the exit. There was a large window at the top of the staircase and, almost subconsciously, he glanced out through it at the view down on to St Aldates.

Then, he stopped sharply, and looked again. Something out there was not quite right. What was it? He let his eyes run over the traffic flowing down the street, the handful of parked cars, the Combined Court Centre opposite…there it was! There was a "Big Issue" seller standing under the concrete pillars at the front of the court building. There wasn't usually one there. It was a spot where the pillars tended to hide you from view and it didn't get much footfall except from cops, lawyers and criminals, none of which sounded like obvious purchasers of the "Big Issue." Furthermore, he was wearing a large hat and sunglasses. The man had to be watching the station.

According to protocol, Morse should have phoned the desk sergeant and reported this as a potential security threat, but his gut feeling was that this was somehow connected with his case. Rather than leaving by the main entrance, he went the other way down the corridor, into an intersecting corridor and down a stairway that led to a side entrance sometimes used to get people in and out more discreetly. The public couldn't access it, but Morse knew the code, and exited under a gated concrete archway that led into the car park, and which would conveniently hide him in shadow. He was more or less opposite the "Big Issue" seller now.

Taking a deep breath, Morse ran out of the archway and across the road, taking the man completely by surprise. He dropped his magazines and turned to run, but had only taken a few strides when Morse, with a cry of "Police! Stop!" was on him. Morse clasped his hands around the seller's shoulders, and then, when it was clear there would not be any resistance, pulled off the hat and sunglasses.

"So who are you under this, and why are you keeping the police station under surveillance…Good God!"

It was Walter Ludlow, looking distinctly shifty now his disguise had been penetrated.

"I'm sorry, Dr Ludlow," said Morse, sardonically. "I had assumed that, since I didn't actually have any evidence to link you to Dr Farthing's murder, you would be pleased if I acted professionally, and, you know, _didn't _arrest you. Clearly I was mistaken, since you seem hell-bent on trying to make yourself look as suspicious as possible. What on earth are you doing here?"

"It's not against the law to sell The Big Issue opposite a police station," replied Ludlow.

Morse sighed exasperatedly. "Oh, grow up man. You and I both know you're a respected academic, not a homeless man, and there is no reason for you to be here but to watch the place from which we are running the investigation of your friend's murder. I want to know why you are choosing to behave in this bizarre manner."

There was a long pause, and then Ludlow said, "Because I think what was behind Bob's murder might be a threat to you and to everyone else in this city and even beyond it. The lines I quoted you earlier about things not being dead that can eternal lie come from an ancient Arab text translated into Latin, called the Necronomicon. One of the tales in that is about the city of Sarnath, built by early humans in what it calls the land of Mnar, by a lake. To achieve this, those people attacked and annihilated, or so they thought, a city called Ib and the race of lizard-beings that had lived there. Sarnath stood for a thousand years, but then on the millennium of its foundation…well, it's not entirely clear what happened. Many of the people fled in terror, claiming they had seen strange lights above the lake, then the people of Ib appearing in the windows of the city's palaces. By the time anyone got to Sarnath to investigate, it had been reduced to ruins and anyone that did not flee had vanished."

Morse shrugged. "It sounds like a fairy-tale. Why should this have anything to do with what Dr Farthing found in Port Meadow?"

"Because whatever he found was far older than anything else you would expect in the area. Because, as he described that altar he found to me, it sounded like the spitting image of Bokrug, God of the people of Ib. If you don't believe me, look at this photocopy of Bokrug as pictured in the Necronomicon." He held it out, and it did indeed look very like the lizard-being carved on the altar. "Above all, because part of the story of Sarnath is that, just after the founding of the city, there was a commotion in the temple and the high priest was found dead by the altar. He had scrawled on it the sign in their language for "DOOM". I think Bob's excavation had uncovered part of Sarnath and I think that has drawn back the people of Ib. I told him I was afraid of that during our phone conversation."

There was a long, long silence.

"Dr Ludlow," said Morse. "Frankly, I'm not sure I shouldn't just have you sectioned as a potential danger to yourself and others and treated in the nearest mental hospital. OK, there are some coincidences between what's happened here and a legend recorded in an ancient manuscript. That doesn't make the legend real or mean anything other than, at most, that someone knows about that legend and is putting that knowledge to use in the murders."

"The Necronomicon is in mediaeval Latin. Only a few copies exist, and only a handful of eccentric scholars have ever read it."

"If you think eccentric scholars don't murder people, you obviously don't know much about my work. And where are these "lizard-people" supposed to have spent the intervening millennia anyway?"

"They may have survived under the lake of Sarnath. Who's to say they haven't been under the Thames all along – or under the sea that the Thames flows into?"

Morse had had enough. "_Sane_ people, that's who! Dr Ludlow, please go back to your college room, or even better just go home. I appreciate that you're upset about your friend and I'll make due allowance for that, but I warn you – carry on like this and I'll have you arrested for obstructing my investigation if I don't ask for you to be sectioned."

He turned on his heel and walked away in the direction of St Mildred's College. A little up the road, just outside the main entrance to the police station, he ran into Lewis.

"I was just looking for you, sir. What was all that about?"

Morse told him, briefly, as they walked.

"Jesus, that guy sounds as nutty as David Icke! Lizard-men living under the Thames?"

"Yeah, well…even a stopped clock. He is right about the coincidences between his legend and this case. Keep an eye out for anyone else in the mix who might know about this Necronomicon. Anyway, what were you coming to find me for?"

Lewis explained that the house-to-house enquiries had yielded several reports from neighbours of loud shouts or screams coming from Port Meadow at about 8.30 or so, which they hadn't bothered reporting because it wasn't unknown for the typical Friday night shenanigans in the park to create that sort of noise anyway of an evening. There did not appear to be any direct witnesses, but a man cycling down a track near the river around that time claimed he had seen a fast-moving shape unlike anything he'd seen before shoot across the track and plunge into the bushes next to the river. A few seconds later a splash had followed.

"It could be one of your lizard-men, sir," said Lewis.

"It could be an _otter_, Lewis. Anything else?"

"Well, DC Jenkins looked into Ludlow's alibi. There's a witness who saw him back to his room after dinner at about the time he said and the security camera footage doesn't show him leaving Lincoln College any time afterwards. So I guess he's in the clear - for murder, at any rate. Problem is, who does that leave?"

They made their way through crowds of tourists and shoppers to the gate of St Mildred's College. It was a massive, battlemented affair, built, like the rest of the building, of red brick with lines of oblong sandstone blocks to vary the monotony, and ornamented with a statue of its founder Bishop Whitlock. St Mildred's was a Victorian late-comer among the colleges, set up originally to churn out evangelical missionaries to the Empire, but now inhabited by much the same kind of dissipated sceptics you'd find studying in any of the others.

It was getting late in the afternoon, but the Senior Tutor, Professor Cudlipp, was still in his office, and still willing to receive visitors. To judge by the uncomfortable moulded plastic chairs he and Lewis were given, Morse suspected the Professor didn't usually get many. Given his host's poor selections in the field of office furniture, he politely declined an offer to share in his choice of tea.

"Dr Farthing's death has come as a terrible shock to the College community," said Cudlipp. "As I told Sergeant Lewis earlier, he was a well-respected figure here."

"I'm sure he was," said Morse, "but someone clearly found a motive for killing him."

"I find it hard to believe that it was anyone from St Mildred's."

"So…are you telling us he had no enemies at all?" said Lewis. "Everyone has enemies."

Cudlipp hesitated.

"Well…I don't want to point the finger, but there was rather a nasty incident last term with one of the undergraduates, Ellie Maplin. Bob was her tutor, and had to get involved with telling her to shape up when her academic performance started dropping off seriously. Not long afterwards, Bob received several threatening letters, and he was convinced it was Ellie. She denied it, and we had no proof, so in the end it was agreed that the best solution was that she be allocated another tutor. Not nice at all, but it hardly seems enough for murder."

"Honestly, Professor, you'd be surprised at what sometimes is," said Morse. "Any chance we could see Miss Maplin?"

Ellie Maplin's room was in an unlovely concrete block of student flats that stood just behind the main building of St Mildred's. It was even less of a tourist trap; the narrow, ill-lit corridors smelled of unidentifiable cooking, with undertones of sweat and cheap deodorant. When they realised she wasn't in, Morse and Lewis' interest went up a little; when the porter let them in and the first thing they saw was a goat's skull complete with horns hanging on the wall, it went up a lot. Indeed, the room was something of a treasure trove of occult artefacts and books.

"Bob told me that one of the concerns with Ellie was that she was spending more time on this weird occult stuff than on her work," said Cudlipp. He sounded almost apologetic.

"Look, sir!" called out Lewis, who had popped on a pair of rubber gloves and gone over to poke at a pile of papers on the girl's desk. He lifted up a ring-binder labelled "Necronomicon", and flipped through the photocopies inside. They were copies of a crabbed Latin text with illustrations in a very similar style the one of Bokrug the lizard god that Ludlow had shown Morse.

"OK, Professor," announced Morse. "I think, with the College's permission, we would like to search this room properly. Lewis, can you ask the station to send a couple of SOCOs over here? And I suppose we should be looking for Ellie Maplin too."

"I'm sure I saw her around the College earlier today," Cudlipp said. "But we don't keep tabs on our students to that extent."

By the time the SOCOs arrived it was getting late, and it had been a full day. Morse told them to look for anything that might link Ellie to the murder, and get in touch with him if she showed up. Then he and Lewis headed off home.

"Fancy a quick pint at the Red Lion, Lewis?" asked Morse, as they walked back through St Mildred's red-brick quad. The heat of the day had at last died down, and no doubt the beer gardens would be full that evening.

"Not this time, sir. Valerie wasn't amused at me disappearing and leaving her to run a barbeque on her own. I think she'd prefer me home as soon as possible, really."

"Suit yourself. I hear they have Golden Sheaf as guest beer this month."

It turned out that, for once, Morse's sources were not accurate, and the Red Lion was instead serving Old Mother Riley alongside its usual range of beers. He limited himself to a regretful pint, drunk slowly at a table on the tiny square of browned grass flanked by potted shrubs that passed for a beer garden there. The pub was crowded with students and locals, noisily gearing up for a night on the town, and Morse was glad to slip off after a while for home and his bed.

He was rudely jerked out of sleep by the insistent buzzing of his mobile phone, to which his instinctive response was a volley of curses. He reached out and turned on his bedside light, then extended his arm a little further for the phone. He got to it, but with the crushing predictability of a bad poker player, managed to hit his alarm clock at the same time, sending it flying across the bedroom floor. Morse swore again, then brought the phone to his ear.

"Hello, Morse speaking," he mumbled.

"Morse? Good. This is Superintendent Jarvis. Can you get down to St Aldates as soon as possible, please? Your murder case has caused a bit of a situation here. No, I can't explain it over the phone – just get your arse into gear and get down here!"

"Yes, ma'am," said Morse, and ended the call. "Oh, hell," he muttered to himself. Pauline Jarvis was the most senior officer at St Aldates, and at that rank strictly a desk jockey who didn't generally get out of bed for anything less than a full-scale street riot. This wasn't going to be pretty, whatever it was. He got to his feet and staggered to the kitchen to brew some coffee, recovering the alarm clock en route. It was 2 am.

By the time Morse had got the Jag parked in the police station car park, the place was swarming like an overturned beehive. Lewis was already standing there, but before he could say a word Superintendent Jarvis stalked over to him, with a face like thunder.

"What on earth is going on with the Farthing case, Morse?" she said. "Someone has broken into the evidence store-room, left it in a total shambles and taken the stone altar that you found with the body."

"Oh, no," muttered Morse. If nothing else, any break-ins at police stations made the Force look like idiots and provided local newspaper editors with no end of amusing copy. Then there was the theft of evidence to deal with. He thought for a second, then said:

"Hold on, ma'am – how do we know this was anything to do with my case? Maybe it was just random, or a burglar got in and thought it might be worth something."

Jarvis shook her head. "It was not random, Morse, because no-one steals a bloody great block of stone that can't be carried by one person on the spur of the moment! And as for your other idea…well, come on, you'd better see the CCTV footage. You too, Robbie, you're supposed to be running this inquiry as well."

Jarvis led them to the small CCTV control room in the station, where a lone operator was sitting in front of a bank of monitors.

"Play back the tape, Steve, and show DCI Morse what the camera saw."

The camera in question overlooked the car park behind the station they had just come from, and when Steve played back footage from earlier that evening they could clearly see several figures clamber over the wall separating it from Christ Church Meadow behind it. They were squat, bow-legged and did not look human. In fact, they looked far more like lizards, with bulging eyes, oddly-shaped ears and pouting, flabby lips, as though they had all had been injected with collagen.

"Bloody hell," said Lewis.

"I'm afraid I was looking at another screen just as they came over that wall," said Steve. "And immediately after that, the power failed, for no obvious reason. Cameras, alarm system, the lot. In the confusion, they were able to break into the evidence room, get what they wanted and get back over the wall."

"I think," said Morse, "they probably came over Christ Church Meadow from the Thames, or the Cherwell, and probably went back there too."

Jarvis gave Morse and Lewis a hard look. "Just what are you two not telling me about this case?"

The discussion that followed was long and awkward, although fortunately Jarvis was not so angry that she couldn't see the logic of "not taking the involvement of millennia-old monsters in the murder seriously because it sounds like a pants-on-the-head loony conspiracy theory."

"Even now," said Morse, "just because the lizard-people broke into the police station doesn't mean they necessarily committed the murder. If they were after the altar all along, why not take it from the scene after killing Farthing? That's much easier than burgling a police station to get it back."

"OK," said Jarvis. "You can run with your human suspects for this one for the moment, but it really needs to be wrapped up quickly. I'm going to have to go to the Chief Constable with this video footage, and I wouldn't be surprised if it doesn't go all the way to 10 Downing Street after that. Intelligent lizard-men under the Thames are about the most world-shaking thing that could have turned up in Oxford, short of aliens landing in the town centre and asking to be taken to our leader."

Morse and Lewis agreed, and wearily trudged out of the station to collect their cars and drive home again.

"I suppose you want me in here for six o'clock sharp, sir?" asked Lewis.

"I'm afraid so," said Morse. "We have to track down Ellie Maplin. At the moment, she's our best lead."

As it turned out, although Lewis was at the station at the appointed hour, he needn't have been, at least not for finding Ellie Maplin. She was picked up on the High by a passing uniform not long afterwards, coming back early from an overnight stay with a boyfriend at another college. She explained to him that she wanted to get back in time to fit in "a proper cooked breakfast" before attending the Eucharist at St Mildred's College Chapel that morning.

"Attending Eucharist?" said Morse, as he and Lewis sat across from Ellie, at a Formica-topped table in a bare interview room which just about fitted four people and the tape recorder. This was not exactly what he was expecting from the occult literature in her room, not to mention the copy pages from the Necronomicon. Mind you, Ellie Maplin herself was not exactly what he had been expecting; about as Gothic and bespectacled, but, as might have been expected from her enthusiasm for fry-ups, rather heavier.

"Does that surprise you?" she said.

"It doesn't seem to fit with your other, erm…interests."

"Being interested in magic or vampires doesn't disqualify you from having an interest in Christianity too. Just ask Anne Rice."

Morse had never heard of Anne Rice. Sensing an awkward moment, Lewis decided to come to the rescue.

"What were your feelings towards Dr Farthing?"

"I wasn't very happy with the way he treated me as my tutor. I was going through a bit of a bad patch, feeling depressed, and not really paying as much attention to my work as I should have. He wasn't very sympathetic to that. He just thought I was being self-indulgent and choosing to bury myself in gloom and horror. But I didn't hate him over it and I didn't kill him, if that's what you're getting at."

"Did you send him threatening letters, though?" asked Morse.

Ellie sighed. "I went through all this with Professor Cudlipp months ago. Yes, I did once leave a note in his pigeonhole that said something like "I hope you remember what you did to me if you ever end up somewhere on your own needing help." I admit it was stupid, but I was very unhappy and not thinking straight at the time. And I signed that one. The letters Cudlipp was concerned about were anonymous, typed and…a lot creepier."

"Creepier? In what way?"

"Well, they claimed to come from some group of people who were angry about the way archaeologists went out and dug up bodies that had been buried without taking into account that they had chosen to be buried that way in that place, and disturbed sacred places. And they wrote in this weird way. The one line that really sticks in my mind is, "We are not armed, save in the strictly anatomical sense." Who on earth would think they need to qualify saying they aren't armed in that way?"

Morse and Lewis glanced at each other.

"Did we ever get hold of those letters?" said Morse.

"Cudlipp told me he threw them out," said Lewis. "Apparently the matter never got reported to the police; "reputation of the College" and all that."

"Great."

There was a knock on the door. A detective came in and wordlessly handed Morse a piece of paper, then left.

"Well, Miss Maplin," said Morse, reading the paper. "It seems as if our search of your room produced nothing linking you with Dr Farthing's murder and your boyfriend has confirmed he was with you at the time we think the murder was committed. I think we'd better let you go and have breakfast now."

She rose to go. "Thanks. It'll probably be even thinner than usual this morning. Half the time it's usually just me and Mr Stapleton, and I imagine he won't have for the stomach for food right now, with what's been going on."

"Really?" said Lewis. "So Stapleton has breakfast all on his own on Sundays? I suppose he's giving his wife a break."

"His wife?" said Ellie. "I didn't know he had a wife. To be honest, we all assumed he was gay."

A few hours later, Frank Stapleton, having been detained at Paddington station with a ticket for Eurostar in his pocket, was sitting in the same chair that Ellie Maplin had been in. Sunday was as hot as Saturday had been, and outside the sun was already high in the sky, already beating down fiercely, and once more people's thoughts were turning to barbeques and to which pubs had the best beer gardens and nicest riverside settings. The interview room had little air conditioning, and with the three of them and a uniformed constable in it, was unbearably sticky. "Making the suspects sweat", today, was no metaphor.

"Mr Stapleton," began Morse, "you told us yesterday that your wife, Pamela, would provide you with an alibi for the time Dr Farthing was murdered, and that's exactly what the PC who visited your house thought happened. I don't think he's ever going to quite live it down, because it turns out that Pamela is Doug Burns aka Pammie Manderson, an admittedly highly professional female impersonator who was not your wife. Although you were living together."

Stapleton shrugged. "I suppose I'm not exactly the first gay man to lie about his sexuality, and I don't see why that should make me a suspect in Bob's murder."

"It doesn't," said Morse. "But I don't like people who lie to me about things in an investigation, even trivial things. It's so often a sign that they're lying about the really important stuff too. And guess what? We re-interviewed Doug and, reminded of the potential penalties for perjury, he's decided that actually, you weren't together that evening. He got back late from a show in the West End of London, and he has no idea where you were before that. He lied to us because you asked him to. So now you have no alibi for the murder, and we can prove that you tried to mislead the investigation too. Not to mention your rather sudden decision to take a solo foreign holiday the very next day."

Stapleton kept his composure, but with an effort that was obvious. His hands trembled slightly.

"I was shaken up by Bob's death…I needed to go somewhere to clear my head."

"Is that why you burned some clothes yesterday, too?" said Lewis. "Doug mentioned you having the fire, and your neighbours noticed it as well. We found what was left of the clothes. You know, forensic science is advancing all the time – do you want to bet the rest of your life in prison against us finding something on them to link you to the murder, like Dr Farthing's blood?"

Stapleton was silent.

"I don't think this was all pre-planned, Mr Stapleton," said Morse. "If it was the whole tale might not have crumbled under scrutiny, with a clever chap like you making it up. I'm prepared to believe it was all done on the spur of the moment, and so might the judge when it comes to sentencing. But not if you stonewall and deny everything all the way."

There was another long silence.

"I guess it was all pretty much done on the spur of the moment," said Stapleton finally. "Really, you can put Bob down as one more victim of the Necronomicon. They always say it drives men mad, gives them forbidden knowledge that no human can cope with, sends them off on insane quests. And with Bob and me, it was the idea of finding Sarnath. We were sure that the legend was a distorted version of a genuine historical truth, of a great city existing long before what we call civilisation. And then, right on our doorstep and after years of trying, we found it. We were convinced those remains in Port Meadow were what was left of the Gate of Doom, the greatest of the gates of Sarnath."

"So, what was your problem with that then?" asked Lewis. "You were on the point of achieving everything you wanted, surely?"

Stapleton put his head in his hands. "We had always thought that the story of the people of Ib, the lizard beings, was just some kind of later accretion, a wild legend someone came up with to explain the fall of a great city. But then Bob had those weird threatening letters. He thought they were from Ellie Maplin, but to me they read a lot more like they were from something that wasn't even human, something that had found out what we were about and wanted to stop it. But the final straw was the altar. To see Bokrug clearly on that, as shown in the book – that, to me, suggested it might all be true. And if it was, what else in the Necronomicon might be? I became convinced we really were risking finding out more than we or anyone else could cope with. Bob insisted on carrying on. That evening, I came back after everyone else had left to have it out with him. There was an argument, he called me crazy, I got angry and hit him over the head with a shovel."

"Why did you write "DOOM" on the altar in his blood?" said Morse.

"I thought if I made it look like the legend, people would think some kind of supernatural curse had struck him down, or…well, that the lizard-people had got him. I made scratches on his back with a rake for the same reason. Really, it was probably the only bit of clever planning involved."

You say that, thought Morse, but we might never have caught you but for that girl's chance remark. Sometimes, the least planned murders were the hardest to solve.

"What did you do with the shovel?" asked Lewis.

"I threw it in the river, right away."

"We'd better call in the divers, to look for it," said Morse. "It won't have gone far, if we're lucky. In the meantime, Mr Stapleton, we'll be formally charging you with Dr Farthing's murder now. Interview terminated, 11:14 am."

Morse and Lewis went outside into the corridor, while the uniform led Stapleton away.

"So, sir, you were right to compare this with the Walton murder. Well, half right anyway. I mean it wasn't those lizard-things that did the murder…"

"…but they were the motive for it being done," broke in Morse. "I should probably apologise to Walter Ludlow, if I can find him. I suspect he's still in town."

"But what's going to happen about the lizard-people now?" said Lewis.

"I can tell you that," interrupted a voice. It was Superintendent Jarvis, and she gestured them back into the interview room and shut the door. She carefully checked that the tape recorder was off. "I've just come from a meeting with the Chief Constable and some people from London, Special Branch and Security Service officers and others. This is exactly the sort of incident Government has been dreading since those goings-on in South London last year. As you two saw that CCTV recording, it's considered safer to let you know what's happening than tell you nothing and have you trying to find out."

"What about Steve?" said Morse.

"He's getting a…less-detailed version. I'm discussing exactly how much so with his manager. Needless to say, however, this is still an official secret, and if you disclose it you will both be subject to disciplinary proceedings for gross misconduct. Very soon, you will notice large boats on the river that you won't have seen there before and the story will go around that dredging work is being done. It is not being done and that is not the purpose of those boats. They will be there to locate where these lizard-people are living, so that they can be neutralised."

"They might be anywhere along the Thames, ma'am, or even out in the North Sea somewhere," said Morse.

"If necessary, the Navy will get involved," said Jarvis. "There'll be a plausible explanation given for that, too."

"By neutralise, you mean kill, don't you, ma'am?" said Lewis.

"Yes," she said.

"But these creatures played no role in this murder!" protested Morse. "All we know that they did was steal back an altar which was theirs in the first place. Does that really justify this kind of…genocide?"

"Chief Inspector Morse," said Jarvis. "I appreciate we may all have our views on the morality of what's about to be done, but believe me, the decision has been made at the highest levels. You're not being asked to approve it, just to let the people whose job it is get on with doing it. As I understand it, the view is that we can't allow sentient beings with the same level of intelligence and culture to stake any kind of claim to share the planet. It's our world, after all."

"But…"

"Morse, let this one go! Am I making myself clear?"

There was an awkward silence. Lewis and Morse nodded assent.

"Thank you," said Jarvis. "Naturally, if the subject is ever raised I will forever deny having this conversation with you." She left the room

They continued to sit there in silence. Eventually, Lewis said:

"It's about lunchtime now. Feel like an early pint?"

"Yeah, definitely," said Morse.


End file.
